Real-time Geometry-Aware Augmented Reality in Minimally Invasive Surgery.

Abstract

The potential of Augmented Reality (AR) technology to assist minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) lies in its computational performanceand accuracy in dealing with challenging MIS scenes. Even with the latest hardware and software technologies, achieving both real-timeand accurate augmented information overlay in MIS is still a formidable task. In this paper, we present a novel real-time AR frameworkfor MIS that achieves interactive geometric aware augmented reality in endoscopic surgery with stereo views. Our framework tracks themovement of the endoscopic camera and simultaneously reconstructs a dense geometric mesh of the MIS scene. The movement of the camerais predicted by minimising the re-projection error to achieve a fast tracking performance, while the 3D mesh is incrementally built by a densezero mean normalised cross correlation stereo matching method to improve the accuracy of the surface reconstruction. Our proposed systemdoes not require any prior template or pre-operative scan and can infer the geometric information intra-operatively in real-time. With thegeometric information available, our proposed AR framework is able to interactively add annotations, localisation of tumors and vessels,and measurement labeling with greater precision and accuracy compared with the state of the art approaches.